Last week Britain’s very own burgeoning version of Wal-Mart, called Tesco, became the first UK retailer to surpass two billion pounds in profit. Below we detail exactly how the company, which takes one in every eight pounds spent at UK shops, has been able to achieve this financial feat and we examine what damage its rise is causing to the fabric of society.

The little red email has been fortunate to snare the thoughts of a financial consultant to the supermarket giant who agreed to speak to us on the condition of anonymity.

Our source describes how Tesco expands overseas (now it has around 600 stores outside Britain) using a model called ‘Tesco In A Box’ which is rolled out everywhere.

“This means that all their current UK practices of ‘Category Management’ where the supplier is forced to take on additional responsibilities of managing shelf space etc (i.e. taking on more cost, while having to lower the cost to the supermarket) are rolled out across the world,” the source explained. “The relationship with the suppliers is the scariest one. For example in Turkey they have a very good relationship with suppliers, and do not crap on them. As soon as the UK ‘consultants’ arrive they cannot understand why they don’t bend over backwards and they immediately started drafting ‘Supplier Ways of Working’ — scary in just the title.” It is the buyers our source reserves the greatest scorn for describing them as “the real scum of the earth”.

A long term advocate of independent food suppliers, our man formerly on the inside goes on to say: “I don’t shop at supermarkets for food; it is crap, processed, twisted food, re-branded and packaged to sound nice. 9 times out of 10 you are getting premature, visibly tasty food, which is not how it should be. They pick fruits early so that it can make the supply chain. What beef should look bright red and have no fat, because it is visibly appealing to the gullible UK consumer,” he asks.

Fresh food should be brought from the market or local producers, where you know the food you are getting will taste nice, have been picked the day before (not 2-3 days, or earlier, and packaged in a fake atmosphere). Fish should be from sea to plate in less than 24 hours ideally, not go through some huge distribution centre and get frozen. Scottish salmon, for instance, is farmed in Scotland, caught and frozen, (but sold as ‘fresh — previously frozen’. Guess which bit in small letters?) shipped to distribution centres in the UK and then allocated back to supermarkets across Britain, including back to Scotland — a huge waste of fuel.

As well as the desecration of city centres, the limiting of choice, Tesco is truly harsh when it comes to bargaining.

Campaign group ActionAid showed how South African women who grow fruit for Tesco receive “poverty wages” of £32.50 or less a fortnight. The minimum wage in South Africa is £36 every two weeks.

Another contentious area is the cost of milk. About 40 dairy farms close every week, according to the pressure group Farm, prompting regular protests against Tesco from farmers calling for a greater share of milk’s retail price.

Meanwhile, the price that Tesco paid suppliers for bananas fell 30 per cent between 2002 and 2003.

Andrew Simms, at the New Economics Foundation, told the Independent: “The more Tesco makes, the more they can afford to cross-subsidise and unfairly compete against smaller players. In this particular winner- take-all economy, the losers are suppliers, small independent shops and ultimately consumers.”

A beef farmer might sell a cow to Tesco for between 500 to 625 pounds; Tesco customers will pay double that. Meanwhile, Tesco buys lamb in at 3.40 per kilo and sells it at 11 pounds a kilo while more and more farms go out of business in this game of survival of the fittest.

Friends of the Earth warned last week that Tesco’s unchecked growth is putting small shops and British farmers out of business, and reducing public choice of where to shop, Friends of the Earth warned today.

With 2,300 stores worldwide and a 30% British market share (a monopoly is technically anything above 25%) the environmental body is calling on the Department of Trade and Industry to amend the supermarket Code of Practice so that it protects suppliers from the bullying behaviour of big supermarkets, as well as to stop any new mergers and acquisitions in retailing until the full impact has been investigated.

“Its uncontrolled growth is destroying our town centres by putting local shops out of business and leaving the public with less choice on where to shop. Its thirst for profits is causing many British farmers to go out of business,” warned Friends of the Earth’s Senior Food Campaigner Vicki Hird.

Eighty two new stores are planned this year, including 17 out-of-town hypermarkets, plus many more stores overseas. Only 0.2% of Tesco lines are fair trade.

Award winning food journalist Joanna Blythman excellent book Shopped shows the carnage involved in getting produce onto shelves.

She writes: “Supermarkets’ power to shape our shopping and eating habits is phenomenal, and they know it. The trick is to get us to think that they are responding to our needs and desires when actually we are responding to theirs. ‘Giving customers what they want’ is supermarket-speak for ‘selling what we want to sell’. Supermarkets use a number of strategies to pull off this brainwashing.

“The number one supermarket ruse is, having created a problem, to present themselves as the solution to it.

“Food shopping in UK supermarkets … has become a dreary treadmill where increasingly overweight yet undernourished consumers are invited to stock up with food in the same anonymous, automatic way they fill up their tanks with petrol. It is no coincidence that supermarket shoppers regularly complain about spending large sums of money in their store yet being unable to think of anything to cook that night. Just thinking about supermarket shopping is enough to make most of us feel tired and uninspired.

“Supermarket shopping trips, for many people, are an exercise in extreme alienation. Nor is it just chance that we seem to be getting fatter yet getting less and less pleasure from feeding ourselves. Supermarket shopping makes us into robots, stopping off at pre-programmed points as we always do. Picking the same old stuff. Buying what supermarkets want us to buy.”

Here’s what Ms Blythman recommends we do to avoid this scourge of modern day living. “Support non-supermarket shopping alternatives wherever you can,” she urges. “Swap some of your business to independent outlets. Revisit independent food shops and think about what proportion of your shopping you could transfer to them. Buy your newspapers in newsagents, buy your wine from wine shops, use the local pharmacy for prescriptions and so on. Every sale diverted from a supermarket helps independents flourish … Don’t worry if you can’t swap the lot. Just remember Tesco’s own words, ‘Every Little Helps’.

For more on Friends of the Earth’s campaign to limit the spread of Tesco click here.

There’s no pleasing some people. After the West’s mild reproach and disappointment over Tian’anmen (well, they had to tread lightly — there was money at stake), after all the head-shaking about Chinese repression of dissent: the latest protest rallies in China have attracted scorn and disdain around the world. So much for supporting free expression — it would appear that the West, like the Chinese government, holds a dim view of protests that go counter to their own ideological goals.

Are the anti-Japanese rallies are really being organised by the Chinese government, as right-wingers assert? The little red email asked the ever-useful “cui bono” question and came up with a complicated answer.

So who does profit? The quick answer is no one. There’s no benefit to the Chinese Government in a Sino-Japanese diplomatic war. China desperately needs Japan’s investments and their technological expertise and goods. Without the OEM electronics trade, the Chinese economic miracle could well stall and fail. Does this mean Japan started it? Well, no because Japan also desperately needs China’s market and their cheap import goods are popular too. Much of Japan’s recent recovery hinges on China: it’s not just consumer goods — the large quantities of oil, coal, and steel transported to China, and the goods shipped to have helped Japan’s shipping markets too. So economically, the friction is a lose-lose situation.

So why the fuss? Is it really the schoolbooks? Or is it the UN Security Council seat? Or is it the Diao Yu Islands? Or the oil & gas exploration fracas in disputed waters?

The schoolbooks, the Diao Yu and the oil and gas are all fairly old hat – they’ve been around for ages. The schoolbooks rear their heads every four years. That said, they can’t be underestimated as a gesture of bad faith to the rest of Asia, and this has been accentuated by Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine and all its implications of the current state of Japanese politics and nationalism. Given the Japanese talent for saying the polite thing, whilst actually thinking the diametric opposite, nothing says ‘insincere apology’ like a yearly visit to Yasukuni. So the schoolbooks merely fanned the flames.

The Diao Yu are also a bone of contention, but as they are uninhabited, they’re more an exercise in “face” for both parties: only the most dedicated jingoistic loons could really get angry over who ‘owns’ them this year. The oil & gas drilling promises to be more of a problem, but as of yet the finds haven’t been large enough to warrant serious anger on either side.

In fact this year’s first and foremost ‘outrage’, from a Chinese nationalistic point of view, is probably the elephant in the corner that none of the press reports seem to be mentioning: Taiwan. The recent pledge by Japan and the US that Taiwan was a ‘common security issue’ — and thus by extension that the Japanese military would get involved should it come to a fight is perhaps a prime factor behind anti-Japanese sentiment. Tied to these concerns is the concern over the growing pressure in Japan to drop the “Self-Defence” part of the Japan Self-Defence Force and make it a real military again.

With the fear of resurgent militarism and nationalism in mind, the move to add Japan as another permanent member to the UN Security Council with another veto (and make the UNSC even less effective than it is now) can be viewed as added fuel to the fire. Although it could be argued that as the second largest financial contributor, Japan should be entitled to a similar sort of lop-sided representation to that the US has been able to buy: Koizumi for next president of the World Bank, anyone?

All of which leads the little red email to a depressingly conspiracy-free conclusion: the anti-Japanese rallies are actually the fruits of a grass roots movement of hatred against Japan — Japan’s war record, to be precise, which the Chinese government is letting slide, because it’s safer and more stable to have people protest Japan than to not allow them.

There are more and more non-government sanctioned demonstrations and riots in China these days. Most are at root, aimed at local governments and officials, and especially corruption therein. So for the CCP, the prospect of having a few demonstrations that are aimed elsewhere is probably viewed as not only good but also cathartic. It’s worth bearing in mind that any country’s government officials are generally patriots, when we look at the Chinese governments’ actions. For the Chinese leadership the protests have good and bad aspects: the good is it promotes nationalism and a refreshingly pro-government stance. The problem is it quickly becomes embarrassing, and its suppression is a lot more problematic: after all if you can’t sing the national anthem, express your love of China and protest against Japan, what can you protest about?!? It is a slippery slope, and it’s much harder to squash: after all this is no direct threat to the PRC’s government like Tian’anmen.

So there you have it: an actual grass roots protest that the Chinese government would dearly love to control, but have to tacitly accept in order to survive. However misplaced the sentiments, and the little red email certainly thinks they are misplaced, the power of the actual people in China hasn’t been this strong in a good long while (shall we say six years?): so should the West really be complaining?

As one mainlander, Liu Wei, puts it on the BBC website “When we Chinese stand out to tell the world what we think, you say we are manipulated by the government. When we want to keep silence, you say we do not have human rights.”

The increasing blur between big business and government (think Cheney/Halliburton and Bush Snr/Carlyle Group) has been made more hazy with the recent appointment of Tom Ridge, the former minister of fear — or secretary for homeland security — to the board of directors at radio frequency identification manufacturers Savi Technology. RFID, a tracking device much used by the department of defence and the homeland security guys too, is a major menace to society that will soon track people’s movements. The tags are to be put into US passports and their biggest proponent during his time in office was none other than Mr Ridge.

“Secretary Ridge has demonstrated throughout his career in public service the leadership, knowledge and strategic insights that he will bring to our board,” said Vic Verma, Savi’s president and chief executive officer. “We believe his geopolitical perspective and his commitment to fostering joint government and commercial initiatives will be beneficial to Savi as we continue to develop solutions to improve efficiency and security throughout the global supply chain.” Or put another way, with the government fully on board we can totally rule!

“Savi is a leader in the development of RFID solutions in both the government and commercial sectors and I believe there is a real opportunity to improve the management and security of global supply chains using this technology,” said Ridge in a fluffy press release.

The little red email contacted the Californian based Savi Technology and asked if there was any conflict of interest for Tom Ridge to join the corporation so soon after serving as a cabinet member in the Bush administration. “US law provides for significant limitations on ex-Cabinet members abilities to interact with the government after leaving office. Savi and Secretary Ridge intend to fully comply with these limitations,” a monotone spokesman replied. The spokesman refused to reveal how much the fear monger-in-chief was to be paid and could only define Ridge’s role at Savi as follows: “We believe that Mr Ridge’s global, geopolitical perspective and understanding will be valuable to us as we strive to build on our global business.”

RFID uses a frequency that many countries, principally Japan, South Korea and China do not use. By demanding that this technology, which incidentally has not been given any industry standard yet, be onboard all shipments heading to the US, the government is moving to eavesdrop on East Asia.

For more on the worrying advance of RFID, click here.

And in case you have forgotten what Tom Ridge was employed to do as homeland security secretary might we recommend you let Mark Fiore remind you.

Immigration, immigration, immigration. This is the message that the opposition Conservative party is shoving down the British electorate’s throats in the run up to the May 5 election. And is it any wonder given that the election maestro is the same Australian who masterminded John Howard’s victory Down Under last year — a win that played heavily on the divisive issue of immigration control. The Conservative leader in Britain, Michael Howard, has been pushing immigration control as one of his strongest themes. And it all backfired last week spectacularly in a way that we, at Canned Revolution, can only snicker at. The Guardian revealed last week that the Conservative candidate for the tight constituency of Dorset south, Ed Matts, had used his Photoshop skills to fall into the party line on immigration. The original picture showed Mr Matts supporting a local failed asylum seeking family from Malawi facing deportation while the doctored version took the family out of the background and replaced the slogan on the placard with the words ‘Controlled immigration’. No one has put the ‘con’ quite so firmly into ‘Conservative’ since Mark Thatcher.

The original photograph shows Mr Matts in a crowd of local supporters holding up a photo of the family, with veteran Tory MP Ann Widdecombe by his side holding a placard saying “let them stay”.

“It is sad when our cause can be used for political gain. I am disappointed because Ed Matts had supported the campaign. It feels we have been stabbed in the back,” said the mother of the soon-to-be-deported family.

Lynton Crosby, the Australian behind the Tories election campaign, will stoop very low to ensure that a second Howard gets in power after the success down under where lies were used regularly to scare the electorate into voting for John Howard. These lies included myths about refugees throwing their children from boats, interest rates going up under a Labour government, persistently linking refugees with terrorism and using the rhetoric of “our soil” — a familiar theme to this year’s British election. Using race as an election card is the lowest of the low — a certain former corporal and failed Austrian painter used it in the 1930s to become leader of Germany and wreak havoc on the world. The irony is Michael Howard is Jewish and his father, also a Jew, was granted citizenship after his illegal immigration to the UK in the wake of World War Two.

If you want to know more about the lies of Lynton Crosby and his Aussie protégé check out www.johnhowardlies.com.

Or alternatively click here to have some fun with those placards that the Tories are holding in the middle of this story.

If you haven’t decide who to vote for, the aptly-named whoshouldyouvotefor.com might be able to help you out.

And finally, for a short history of manipulation a la Photoshop from Stalin to the present day click here.

Fake drugs, once just the scourge of developing countries are now increasingly becoming big business for criminals and terrorists around the world and what’s more, the big pharmaceutical companies are not helping solve the problem because it might cost them cash and show just what a rip off their real products are. The little red email’s medical correspondent, Dr Jim, offers this report after a return to the UK.

Counterfeit drugs have long been an epidemic across Asia. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 25% of medicines consumed in developing nations are counterfeit or substandard. This poses a significant public relations nightmare for the pharmaceutical industry, desperate to protect their increasingly valuable market share. Instead of educating the public to beware of these products, they are employing vast resources to sweep this under the carpet. News of this problem is starting to leak out though. A study published last year in the Lancet, a British medical journal, found that a third of anti-malarial drugs on sale in Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam, a region in which malaria is a voracious killer, contained no active ingredient. The WHO estimates that there are around 200,000 preventable deaths from malaria annually, as a direct result of counterfeit medicines.

An estimated 192,000 people died last year in China because of fake drugs, according to the Shenzhen Evening News, a government-controlled newspaper. Some die from toxins in counterfeit medicines and others from infection because they are swallowing bogus pills instead of antibiotics. Last year, a 31-year-old Glendale man was indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on charges of trafficking in tens of thousands of counterfeit Viagra tablets. The fake Viagra was manufactured in China to look like the real thing. It is estimated that over half of the Viagra sold on the internet is fake, leaving a large number of limp excuses in their wake! UK customs have seized 231,151 fake Viagra tablets in a single year, about the same number of spam emails the little red email gets every year suggesting we buy the latest cheap batch of the blue pill.

Doctors in the New York University Medical Centre were horrified to find that the reason their 16-year-old patient was not responding to the treatment intended to save his life, was that it was fake. Somewhere between the drug’s manufacture and its arrival at the hospital, counterfeiters had taken low dose vials of the drug Epogen, and relabelled them as high dose versions. The weaker drug sells for $22 a bottle compared to the high strength price of $445. This scheme was revealed to have involved 110,000 bogus bottles netting the criminals a staggering $48 million.

The World Health Organisation is targeting countries notorious for the production of these fakes, despite the fact that the equipment and knowledge required to manufacture them is freely available on the internet. India’s cabinet has plans to introduce the death penalty for the offence. This has been backed by opposition MPs, and unsurprisingly given somebody else will do their dirty work, the drug companies themselves.

“This is a golden business for criminal business elements,” said Harvey E Bale Jr, director general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations in Geneva. “If you’re in the business of selling heroin or cocaine, the police are on your tail. If you’re making fake meningitis vaccine, they don’t even know you’re there. We’re sitting here on an un-recognized plague that afflicts the world.”

The pharmaceutical industry has been very slow to react to this problem, and with good reason. Wholesale prices for popular brand-name prescription drugs rose an average 7.1% in 2004, more than twice the general inflation rate, a new study commissioned in the US warned last week – the rip offs at least aren’t ripping you off as much as the real deal. At a recent conference in Madrid, the WHO stated it believed that drug companies had a great deal of data on the problem, but were reluctant to make it available for analysis. A confidential email from the Pharmaceutical Security Institute (a group set up by the pharmaceutical industry to combat counterfeiting in the US and Europe) stated: “It is necessary to keep fake drug information confidential for commercial reasons. If a patient came to harm as a result of a counterfeit product, the company’s good reputation is in danger of disappearing”. It has opposed new legislation to impose stricter controls on the production of drugs and has tried to prevent the introduction of new documentation to show the chain of supply. They are not required to report cases of counterfeit products to the FDA or to consumers in the US. Recently a voluntary code of practice has been introduced requiring companies to declare counterfeit drugs within five days of discovery. It remains to be seen if this will do anything to swell consumer confidence. The little red email will not be holding its breath.

For more from Dr Jim click here, here, here and here.

Another correspondent rears their head. This week Agent Swordfish, the little red email’s very own Langley-handled ringer, gives us a review of The Rise of the Vulcans, A History of Bush’s War Cabinet, from the right-field with the emphasis on his former dean, Paul “the Wolfman” Wolfowitz as he moves from the recently completed planning of the invasion & occupation of Iraq on to trouble-shooting the World Bank: let the dissent begin. Let a hundred flowers bloom...

Paul Wolfowitz is bound to come under sharper focus by the liberal microscope as he assumes the helm of the World Bank.

Clearly many of his detractors have itchy trigger fingers thanks to his role as the archetypical ideologue in the architecture that ousted Saddam Hussein. Wolfowitz is also a key player in the neocon ideology that calls for the United States to be so strong and action oriented that no challenger would dare to emerge.

Liberals and conservatives alike should find plenty of insights about Wolfowitz and his cronies in “The Rise of the Vulcans, A History of Bush’s War Cabinet” by Pulitzer-Prize-winning Washington Post journalist James Mann. This is a group biography of six foreign policy neo-conservatives that matured to their current status after an incubation in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush Senior Administrations. The fellow Vulcans are Condoleezza Rice, Richard Armitage, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Dick Cheney.

The term Vulcan is self-anointed by the foreign policy advisors in the George W campaign. It is a reference to the 60-foot statue of Vulcan erected in Birmingham Alabama to recognise the importance of Birmingham Steel Mill in the home town of Condoleezza Rice. 

Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld were participants in the debates over the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, (a Kissinger policy that was first given a good kicking by Rumsfeld, then trashed by Reagan). Armitage and Powell came of professional age in the Vietnam War.

The word ‘volcano’ comes from the little island of Vulcano in the Mediterranean Sea off Sicily. Centuries ago, the people living in this area believed that Vulcano was the chimney of the forge of Vulcan - the blacksmith of the Roman gods. They thought Vulcan’s forge beat out thunderbolts for Jupiter, king of the gods, and weapons for Mars, the god of war.

The Vulcans book contains some crucial insights into Wolfowitz.

He was the theoretician behind the concept that if America pursued a unilateral military build up rather than bank the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War, then no country would contemplate challenging the United States.

He was the first senior foreign policy maker to warn about Iraq and suggested an overthrow at least a decade ago.

He was instrumental in the ouster of Marcos once George Schultz convinced Reagan to pull the plug.

He has openly called (at least on one occasion) for the recognition of Palestinian rights.

(“Innocent Palestinians are dying and suffering in great numbers as well. It is critical that we recognise and acknowledge that fact.” -page 325)

For those who oppose unilateral application of American military power, the clear leading role in the neo-con constellation is Wolfowitz.

Democractisation is a central tenant of the Wolfowitz doctrine. The idea is that citizens of democratic countries are less likely to be supportive of a military expansionism or adventurism. Herein then, more democracy will reduce military competitors to the hegemony of American power. Food for thought served up for the liberal table.

It looks like everyone is getting in on the outsourcing of torture act, not just the US, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report. Even seemingly benign countries like Canada and Sweden are accused of sending men off to countries where they are routinely tortured. Governments around the world often send suspects to dodgy countries “on the basis of flimsy diplomatic assurances” HRW reported, with torture often ensuing.

Countries guilty of such illegal deportations include the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden and the Netherlands.

“Governments that engage in torture always try to hide what they’re doing, so their ‘assurances’ on torture can never be trusted,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “This is a very negative trend in international diplomacy, and it’s doing real damage to the global taboo against torture.” 

“Governments that are using diplomatic assurances know full well that they don’t protect against torture,” said Roth. “But in the age of terror, they’re convenient. Only pressure from the public in Europe and North America can stop this negative trend.” 

 Many unfortunates living in the west have found themselves cuffed to a plane seat with a one-way ticket to hell heading to such countries as Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Russia, and Turkey.

Torture is banned under international law. No exceptions are allowed, even in times of war or national emergency and certainly not during these phoney War on Terror™ (TWOT™) times. The ban includes the absolute prohibition on transferring people to places where they face a risk of torture. 

 “If these suspects are criminals they should be prosecuted, and if they’re not, they should be released,” said Roth. “But shipping them off to countries where they’ll be tortured is not an acceptable solution.”

For more on Human Rights Watch’s campaign against the outsourcing of torture click here.

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

If you fancy your luck, on the other hand...
You could try our latest competition! Yes, that’s right: another chance to be cool for free. Head on over to here to try your luck in our latest revolutionary contest.

 

Aussie weapons spy blows the whistle
ABC’s Four Corners news programme presents a kiss & tell interview with Rod Barton, an Australian Intelligence officer who worked in UNSCOM. Rod blows the whistle on the CIA’s use of UNSCOM as an intelligence-gathering tool (and Richard Butler’s complicity in this process), something the US denied when Saddam’s Iraq initially accused UNSCOM of this. He also corroberates the fateful BBC report of the sexed up dossier, claiming that Dr David Kelly said precisely that to him. And tells the sordid tale of the Iraq Survey Group, falsifying information and torturing “high-value” prisoners.

 

With apologies to both Queens...
But who can resist this musical homage to the newest royal?

 

Does my aft look big in this?
Our ship spotter comrade reports on a most unfortunate vessel christening. It had to happen sooner or later for Titan Petrochemicals, a Hong Kong based tanker firm, who name all their ships after planets in the Solar System. Uranus, unsurprisingly, was last on the list.

 

Things go drier with Coke
With thanks to Access Asia. Coca-Cola has played its part in putting the pounds on Asia in recent decades, but consider the following before you pop another can of Coke, or slosh some in your whisky:
1) It takes five litres of water to make one litre of Coca-Cola.
2) Coca-Cola is the most popular fizzy drink in China.
3) In 2004, 400 cities in China suffered water shortages and a drought hit Southern China.

 

The Firth comes forth...
With more madness. The crazed creator of Salad Fingers presents: The Child that Smelt Funny. A cautionary tale about banning and pyrotechnics.

 

Calling all adbusters
Here’s yet another chance to lay your hands on one of our t-shirts.

Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your finest corporate subversion images in to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as Apple’s new personal torture device: the iRaq, Coke’s new Vietnam Campaign from these guys or even a home grown one (see below). To stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island.

Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.

Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

French letter gets African upgrade
First the Japanese invented toilets that cleaned your behind for you, now an African has come up with an automatic condom fitter, presumably for the busy executive or merchant banker who need to put one on quickly.

 

The Little Red Email Osama bin Laden Sweepstakes Shirt Contest!
Don’t forget: if you fancy a free Canned Revolution t-shirt, you can win one by simply guessing the date of Osama’s media debut as a US prisoner. Send your expected date of bin Laden’s first television appearance as an American prisoner to osamasweepstakes@cannedrevolution.com.